For most of farming's history, the most skilled worker on any farm was the one who could drive and care for its draft animals — oxen first, then horses, whose numbers in the United States peaked around 26 million in the late 1910s. The tractor erased the trade in a single generation: by 1960 working horse teams had all but vanished from American and western European fields, and the ploughman's craft survives mainly in ploughing matches, heritage farms and Amish communities.
Horse-team ploughman no longer exists as a living trade. Here is what erased it, and which profession took on the work.
1700 – 1900
The Agricultural Revolution and the world grain trade
Britain's agricultural revolution — Tull's seed drill, the Norfolk four-course rotation, Bakewell's selective livestock breeding and the enclosure of the open fields — roughly doubled yields and freed the labor that fed the Industrial Revolution's factories. Railways, steamships and the McCormick reaper then opened the American prairies, the Argentine pampas and the Russian steppe to export grain, ruining and remaking farmers across whole continents as world prices reached every village.
What else was happening then
1944–1970
The Green Revolution
Norman Borlaug's semi-dwarf, disease-resistant wheat, bred in Mexico from 1944, and IRRI's IR8 rice transform yields across Mexico, India, Pakistan and the Philippines; India's wheat harvest nearly doubles between 1965 and 1970. Borlaug receives the 1970 Nobel Peace Prize — the only one ever awarded chiefly for plant breeding.
2022
The driverless tractor goes on sale
John Deere unveils a fully autonomous 8R tractor at the CES electronics show in January 2022, steering by GPS and cameras with no one in the cab, while robotic milkers — sold by Lely since 1992 — already handle a large share of new dairy installations in northwest Europe. A century after replacing the horse, the tractor begins replacing its own driver.
Where that work lives now
The profession that made every other one possible — feeding the world for eleven millennia, from the first Fertile Crescent wheat to autonomous tractors.
🌾 Farmer →